SOSH poll: Majority opposed to on-campus CSU stadium

Sixty percent of registered voters in Fort Collins oppose CSU's plan to build a new on-campus stadium, according to a poll released Thursday by an anti-stadium group.

Weary of being told that polls and surveys conducted by Colorado State University's student government, current and former faculty members and the Fort Collins Coloradoan had built-in biases that made their findings invalid, members of the Save Our Stadium Hughes organization paid for a scientific poll that produced similar results, Bob Vangermeersch said.

The poll, conducted with automated phone calls July 13-14 by Triton Polling and Research of Bend, Oregon, found that 43.3 percent of the 1,099 respondents "strongly disapprove" of building on on-campus stadium and 16.6 percent "moderately disapprove." Roughly 25 percent of the respondents favored building the stadium, with 14.4 percent saying they "strongly approve" and 10.5 percent saying they "moderately approve."

Only 15.2 percent said they were neutral or did not care. The poll had a margin of error of 2.9 percent.

A Coloradoan survey, conducted July 1-15, found that 59.1 percent of respondents were opposed to the stadium, 37.2 percent were in favor of the project and 3.7 percent were neutral.

"The SOSH group, believing it was time for the voice of the citizens to be registered accurately, commissioned a scientific, unbiased, statistically valid poll to put to rest any doubt in the minds of key decision-makers about where citizens and taxpayers here truly stand," SOSH member Tom Linnell said Thursday at a news conference at the Poudre River Library District's Old Town Library.

"… The bottom line is this: we do not want this stadium, and the large majority of the community will not support it."

CSU doesn't need voter approval to build the proposed $254 million stadium, nor does it need to follow the city's building codes. CSU President Tony Frank was given conditional approval to move forward on plans for the stadium by the school's Board of Governors in October 2012, provided half of the estimated construction costs are raised in advance through private donations by October of this year.

Brett Anderson, CSU's vice-president for advancement, told the Coloradoan last month that $24.2 million had been raised for the stadium project as of June 30.

"There are a number of factors that will go into a decision about whether the university will move forward with the stadium, and we'll know more about the project status and next steps in October," CSU spokesman Mike Hooker said Thursday.

Hooker didn't comment directly on the poll's findings but did say that the university will continue to work through concerns about the stadium's impact on the city through the Community Development Design Advisory Committee "so that, if we decide to move ahead with a new stadium, it will be done in a manner that incorporates valuable input and insights from community members with a variety of viewpoints."

The advisory committee, made up of representatives from various groups that would be impacted by the stadium, has been meeting monthly since April with representatives of the companies that will be involved in stadium design and construction, if it is built.

Phone numbers for the poll came from a list of more than 108,000 registered voters in Fort Collins, Vangermeersch said. Triton Polling and Research president Lee J. Vasche said the 1,099 responses represented about 6 percent of the total number of voters called, a figure he said was consistent with the industry standard for phone polls. Only respondents who answered the demographic questions that followed the original question, "What do you think of the proposal to build a new football stadium on CSU's main campus?" were counted, Vasche said, to ensure that the voters sampled were an accurate representation of the Fort Collins electorate.

Results were similar when broken down by age group, gender and political party affiliation. For example, 58.7 percent of respondents age 40 and younger indicated they were either moderately or strongly opposed to the stadium and 27.4 percent indicated they were moderately or strongly in favor. Sixty-five percent of women polled were opposed with 19.6 percent in favor, while 54.4 percent of men were opposed with 30.4 percent in favor.

Sixty-one percent of respondents who identified themselves as Democrats were opposed, with 24.9 percent in favor. Among Republicans, 54.3 percent were opposed and 29.4 percent were in favor. Among independents, 62.6 percent were opposed and 22.7 percent in favor.